


Never Been In Love (Before You)

by DetectiveJoan



Category: Leven Thumps - Obert Skye
Genre: (Established Leven/Winter), (amnesia like the theme), (bc skye never adequately explored winter's memory loss and im bitter), (not amnesia like the trope), Amnesia, F/M, Getting Together, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-22 22:19:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8303275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan
Summary: Winter knew she was in love with Leven like she knew – well, not like she knew that the sun would come up in the morning or that the sky was blue, because those things weren’t always true in Foo. She was confident about the loving Leven thing, though. It was a quiet surety, a small spark that burned constantly and quietly in the center of her chest.But then, there was also Geth.(Spoilers through Ruins of Alder.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Some quick content warnings: 
> 
> 1) Leven as the Want is semi-omniscient, which I mention because that can get sort of into non-con territory, but there's nothing overtly rapey here. Just some low-key nonconsensual mind-reading. 
> 
> 2) Underage warnings here are a bit of a toss up as well. Strictly speaking, Leven and Winter are both teenagers, but Skye sort of hand-waved them into adults so ??? In this fic they're explicitly physically 18+ but still chronologically 15 or so. Use your best judgement.
> 
> 3)This fic is almost certainly not sexual enough to warrant the M-rating, but I have a habit of paranoia when it comes to writing fic that is even vaguely more mature than its canon is.

After they hit what Winter chose to think of as the Big Red Reset Button on all of Foo and Reality, fate set them all back on Sycophant Run.

“So that’s it?” Winter said, when the dust had settled. “No more Dearth? No more gateway to Reality? Day saved?”

“Day saved,” Leven confirmed.

“What do we do now?”

Leven shrugged. He looked at Geth.

Geth shrugged too.

* * *

“This is a big step up from a trailer park in Oklahoma,” Winter said, yanking a dust cloth off a huge dining table.

“No kidding,” Leven said from the kitchen. There was a general sort of banging sound that Winter took to mean he was opening every cabinet in turn.

“There weren’t a lot of steps _down_ from the trailer park,” Clover said. He was perched on Winter’s shoulder.

“Remember that night you threw out my purse and made us sleep under a bridge?” Winter said pointedly.

“No,” he said, pulling up his hood and disappearing. “That doesn’t sound like something I’d do.”

She followed his moving voice into the kitchen.

“You know this place is way too big for just the two of us right?” She was still holding the dust cloth, which trailed behind her magnificently in support of her point. “This place was built for twenty people.”

“It wasn’t _built_ ,” Leven pointed out. He was sitting on the floor, pulling pots and pans out of a seemingly infinite cupboard. “It just _is_. It belongs to the Want, so it always has been.”

“It _always has been_ too big for us. I can’t imagine ever needing all this space.”

“It’s not just for us, though. There’s Geth to think of, too. And Clover and Lily, sometimes.”

Winter raised her eyebrows. “They’re coming to live with us?”

“Yeah.”

“What about Phoebe?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess. She’s leaving in a bit, though.”

Winter tossed the cloth over the spread of pans across the floor, causing Leven to look up at her finally. “Why?” she said.

He stood. “Because she’s gonna go find her sisters. She’s not the last of the Longings anymore.”

“How exactly do you know that?”

Clover laughed from the counter top, still invisible. “Even I know that. Foo’s all back in balance. Can’t you feel it?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well. The Longings are dimming Phoebe’s immediate effect. That’s why you and Leven can talk to each other without blushing now.”

Winter shot another questioning glance at Leven.

He gave her a shrug. “It’s true.”

“And here I was thinking you just weren’t in love with me anymore,” she teased.

A small smile tugged at Leven’s lips. He closed the distance between them in two long strides, backing her against the counter and closing his fingers around her hips. “Well, you know that’s not true,” he said, lifting her up to sit on the counter and stepping between her legs.

“Remind me,” she said.

She pulled him into a kiss.

Clover cleared his throat awkwardly. “Uh, I’ll just go then, shall I?”

* * *

“So this is the Want’s house?” Geth said when Leven brought him around later that day. He ran his fingers through a trail of dust on a bookcase that hadn’t been covered.

“You’ve never been here?” Winter asked.

“No one has, really,” Geth said. “None of the previous Wants have ever used it, as far as I know. They were all infamously distrustful of sycophants. I can’t imagine any of them choosing to live out here.”

“So this place has been collecting dust since the beginning of time? Or did the dust get a reset with the rest of Foo?” Winter asked.

Geth chuckled and Winter felt her cheeks warm slightly. Christ, she loved Geth's laugh. 

* * *

She had overestimated the size of the house. It had only thirteen bedrooms.

“There’s no such thing as ‘only’ thirteen bedrooms,” she said, semi-crossly. “We could still never fill this place.”

“Leven could make it smaller,” Geth said nonchalantly.

“Oh.” Leven said, sounding surprised. Then: “I guess I could.”

“What, by burning half of it to the ground?” Winter said. “Or with a bulldozer?”

“With magic,” Leven said thoughtfully, sounding more like he was talking to the wall than to her. His eyes went out of focus and then lit up gold. She turned to Geth for a longer explanation that apparently wasn’t forthcoming from Leven.

“It’s the Want’s house. He’s the Want,” Geth said. “The house is whatever he wants it to be.”

Winter looked back at Leven, who still seemed to be communing with the building. “Being the only person here who doesn’t know literally everything about how Foo works is going to get old really fast,” she said.

Geth took her hand and squeezed it comfortingly. “You’re smart. You’ll figure it all out soon enough.”

* * *

What Leven wanted the house to be, it turned out, was something closer to two bedrooms. The room at the back of the house went to Geth and Phoebe. The room at the front of the house had a bed big enough to fit both Winter and Leven, and a sliding window big enough to crawl through to a large terrace. Directly underneath the window, the house had created a twin sized bed.

“I think you miscounted the number of beds we need,” Winter said.

“I sleep better outside.” Something in Leven’s tone sounded defensive, so Winter bit her tongue.  

* * *

Leven also, apparently, wanted the house to have proper mirrors. They’d been a rarity in her experiences in Foo so far, so Winter was surprised see her reflection the first time she stepped into the small bathroom adjoining their room. She barely recognized her own face. She’d known that she’d been growing more than she should’ve been – a testament to Geth’s sporadically repeated assertion that aging was different in Foo – but she was still shocked to clearly see herself so much older than she had been in Reality.

Leven poked his head into the bathroom. “Everything okay?” he asked.

She didn’t bother looking away from her reflection. “Lev, do you know how old I am?”

“Hmm,” he said, still not stepping into the room but letting his eyes flare gold as he looked her up and down. After some thought, he declared, “Twenty-one.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two,” he replied without hesitation.

Winter turned the faucet on, quickly wet her fingers, and flicked water at him. “You’re just saying that because you want to be older than me.”

He grinned. “You can’t prove that.”

“How old is Geth?”

“Twelve billion,” Leven answered. She crossed the room in a few short strides, aiming to wipe the rest of the water across his cheeks to erase that smug smile, but he stepped forward and easily caught her wrists. The door creaked shut behind him as he chased her into a kiss.

“You’re avoiding the question,” she accused when he pulled away to catch his breath.

He huffed a small laugh against her forehead. “Okay, let me think.” He closed his eyes, but Winter could tell they were burning gold again. He let go of her wrists and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pushing herself up on her toes to press a small line of kisses along his jaw. “He’s, uh, twenty-five, I guess.”

“You don’t sound too sure about that,” she said, burying a grin against his neck.

“Yeah, well, you’re very distracting.”

* * *

“I don't know _everything_ , you know,” Leven said once. Winter scoffed.

“You do when you try,” she said. “It's not my fault if you aren't always paying attention.”

* * *

Sometimes having an omniscient boyfriend was pretty nice. Winter thought about this vaguely whenever she bolted awake from a nightmare – about being frozen by Sabine, or having her gift stolen, or time unraveling and spinning her into nonexistence, or any of a thousand other horrors she’d seen since this all began – and found that Leven had already crawled into their bed, wrapped his arms around her, and pulled her close because he’d known the nightmares were going happen before they did.

* * *

Sometimes having an omniscient boyfriend really _sucked._ Winter announced this fact huffily the first time she realized that she could never properly surprise Leven with a birthday present because he would always already know what she was going to get him.

“We don’t really celebrate birthdays in Foo, anyway,” Geth said. “Time moves differently here than it does in Reality. And besides, Leven’s an Offing and now the Want. He doesn’t exactly age in a timely manner.”

“Aging isn’t the point of birthday gifts,” she said sulkily. “This is about the annual opportunity to make Lev wear a really hideous sweater just because I gave it to him and he thinks it would be rude to tell me how ugly it is. Except now he’s some kind of all-knowing, future-seeing mind-reader, so he already knows that I know that the sweater is ugly, so there’s no point at all.”

“You haven’t bought any ugly sweater yet,” Leven pointed out, “so this realization isn’t really setting you back much.”

“The fact that you know I haven’t bought the hypothetical ugly sweater yet is the whole problem, Lev.”

Leven considered. “You could always give Geth the hypothetical ugly birthday sweater instead.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said, gently punching Leven in the arm. “It’s not the same.”

* * *

It was easy to pinpoint stages of her love for Leven. Winter could look back at her life since leaving Iowa and see exact moments in which she had looked at him and been hit with the realization of just how important he was to her and how much affection she felt for him. And if it had taken Phoebe’s influence to finally understand that it was full-blown love, she’d never wavered since.

Winter knew she was in love with Leven like she knew – well, not like she knew that the sun would come up in the morning or that the sky was blue, because those things weren’t always true in Foo. She was confident about the loving Leven thing, though. It was a quiet surety, a small spark that burned constantly and quietly in the center of her chest.

In a world where things like gravity and linear time weren’t always constants, she clung to this irrefutable certainty.

But then, there was also Geth.

If there had ever been stages of a growing relationship between them, she couldn’t remember them. All she knew was that the first time she saw him restored to his Lithen form after being a toothpick for so long, it had stirred a vague feeling of familiarity. Memories of time spent with him during her last life in Foo had swirled just beyond her ability to grasp. A voice in the back of her head had whispered _you loved him_.

She never figured out exactly what she should do with that information. 

* * *

"You haven't cut your hair since Oklahoma," Winter told Leven in exasperation two weeks after the reset, holding a pair of scissors threateningly. "It's getting ridiculous." 

Leven took refuge behind Geth (rather intelligently, Winter had to admit). "I like it longer," he said tersely, holding the Lithen in front of himself as a buffer.

"Am I meant to be a part of this conversation?" Geth asked. They ignored him. 

"I'm telling you this because I love you," Winter told Leven. "It's gross. I swear to God, it's clogging up the shower drain. And it's in your face all the time. How can you even see?"

"I see fine." 

"C'mon, Lev. Let me cut it." Winter made to shove past Geth, but he adroitly caught her by the wrist and grabbed the scissors from her. He held up his empty hand, open palm towards her as a silent request for patience. Winter huffed. 

He turned around and handed Leven the scissors.

"Thank you," Leven said, dropping his gaze. Geth immediately caught his chin and held it until Leven was forced to look up and meet his gaze.

"It's your choice," Geth said quietly, reaching up with his other hand and softly brushing Leven's bangs aside, "but you really do have the most beautiful eyes. It's a shame they're always covered."

Leven's face and neck turned a surprisingly deep shade of red. Winter was pretty sure she hadn't seen him blush that hard since the day he had first released Phoebe.

She wasn't quite sure what she should do with that information, either. 

* * *

Lev didn't change his mind about the haircut, but Winter pulled Geth aside later all the same. "Thanks for saying that stuff to Leven," she said, "about his...hair." She'd almost said  _eyes_ but changed her mind at the last second. Something about that conversation felt too small and fragile to refer to so directly.

But Geth just shrugged. "I didn't say anything that wasn't true."

* * *

Leven’s penchant for sleeping outdoors wouldn’t have been a problem, but as Winter grew more accustomed to his occasional weight on the other half of her bed, she found it harder and harder to fall asleep on the nights he spent elsewhere. One night, seized by a restlessness she couldn’t explain, she kicked off the blankets, crossed the room to the window, and hoisted herself out. Leven was conveniently curled up near the top half of his smaller bed, fast asleep. Geth was sitting at the other end. The soft smile he offered made her feel slightly less fidgety. Winter settled herself between him and Leven, the small space requiring that she press close against Geth's side.

“Sometimes it's so hard to remember that you're not the Winter I used to know, before we went to Reality,” Geth said, in lieu of a greeting. “It was easier before, when you were younger, to think of you as a different person. I didn't know you last time you were that young but now...”

Winter pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. “Leven says I'm reverting to how old I was before Amelia de-aged me.”

“You're looking more and more like I remember you,” Geth said. “You're getting pretty close, actually. You'll probably stop growing soon.”

She looked over at him, eyes catching on the way the moonlight shone on his long hair. She wanted to reach out and comb her fingers through it. “What do you remember about me? From then?”

He smiled. “You weren't so different from what you are now. Older, mostly. But just as tenacious and brave. One of the first and strongest defenders of Foo from the Dearth's attacks.”

Winter let out a small sigh and looked away. She had heard this before – from half a dozen people who had known her back then. Geth himself had already told her as much. She'd been hoping for more.

But then he continued, “You were the best person I'd ever met at skipping stones. Said that you lived near a river when you were a child in Reality and you and your sister used to compete with each other to see who could get a rock to skip farther. And you used to complain all the time about Foo's stars moving around too much and not making any good shapes. You remembered all of the constellations from Reality. Did you learn them, in Iowa?”

“Not really,” Winter admitted. “I could usually find the Big Dipper and the North Star, but that was about it.”

Geth paused before admitting, “I don't know what that means.”

“I might have been lying to you last time,” she pointed out. “I could have just been making up constellations.”

“The thought crossed my mind occasionally,” he said amiably, “but you were never much of a liar, so I usually trusted that you really knew them.”

Winter thought about starting an argument about her proficiency at deception. She thought about worming her way under his arm and leaning back against his shoulder. She thought about getting up and walking away, finding some other outlet for her restlessness before she did something stupid like comb her fingers through his hair. Instead, she said turned her head sharply to pop her neck and said, “I had a sister?”

He nodded. “Named Autumn, I believe. You didn't talk about her much. I don't think –” he hesitated. “I mean, you were very young when you were snatched, you know. I'm not sure you remembered a lot about her, even when you and I first met.”

Winter closed her eyes, willed her memory to give her some kind of picture of this _Autumn_ , but no image formed. Of course. If it were possible to simply will memories into existence she would have managed to do it a long time ago. “Tell me something else,” she said.

“About you?”

A small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She buried it in her knees. “Yes, all about me.”

“You were a terrible cook. Pretty good swimmer, though. You lived in Cusp for a long time before I met you. You kept your hair long, like it is now, but you braided it back more often. You fell out of a window once and broke your leg. You had a terrible scar from it.”

Winter leaned further into Geth’s space and extended the leg that she’d had pressed against his. Even in the dimness of the moonlight, she could clearly see the angry line scratched from a point just above her knee to a good five or six inches up her thigh. “You mean this?”

Geth made a sound somewhere between amusement and surprise. “That’s it. I can’t believe you still have it.”

“I always thought that was just a really messed up birthmark. Did that happen before or after we met?”

Geth laughed. “Decidedly after,” he said. “You used to tell people that I'd pushed you out the window instead of admitting your clumsiness. And you made me carry you around for weeks afterwards while it healed.”

He reached towards her. Slowly, with the softest touch she could ever remember feeling, he traced his fingers along the line of the scar. Her heart skipped a beat. 

“And we were friends?” she asked, voice quiet.

Winter placed her hand over his; he laced their fingers together.

“Best friends,” he confirmed. “We used to do this all this time, too. Sit outside and watch the stars and talk. You really don't remember any of it?”

There was an edge of sadness to the question.

* * *

“You know, you and Geth used to date,” Leven said one morning while Winter was brushing her teeth.

“Hmm,” she said noncommittally around a mouthful of toothpaste, trying to ignore the way her stomach seemed to have jumped up to somewhere around the vicinity of her throat. “Who told you that?”

“No one. I just...know,” Leven shrugged. “Whatever happened to that?”

“I dunno,” she said, straining for casual. “I would guess we broke up when he turned into a tree and I lost all my memories. But I couldn’t say for sure, since I lost all my memories. Why don’t you ask him?”

“Hmm,” he replied. She rolled her eyes at him in the mirror.

* * *

Having a history with Geth was easier to deal with after Leven had confirmed the hazy facts she’d managed to dig from her still-muddled memories. Whenever she saw Geth and Phoebe kissing and she suddenly felt a vice clamp around her heart, it was comforting to know that the jealousy twisting through her wasn’t completely unfounded -- even if it still felt completely illogical.

(The biggest benefit, though, was when Leven pressed up against her and slid a hand between her legs, licking into her mouth or sucking bruises into her neck and quietly asking if she could remember doing this with Geth, remember what he tasted like, what he felt like.)

(She couldn’t, mostly, but it was good to imagine.)

* * *

Even though Leven had forewarned Winter that Phoebe would be leaving at some point, she was still surprised at the abruptness with which it finally happened. After spouting some bullshit about how she’d truly miss their company but she needed to reunite with her sisters, Phoebe flew off without a backwards glance.

Leven wrapped his arm around Winter’s shoulder; she couldn’t tear her eyes away from Geth as he watched the Longing disappear into the distance.

“You think he’ll be okay?” she asked quietly.

Leven’s eyes shone brightly. “He’ll be fine.”

* * *

One morning a few weeks later, Winter woke up on Leven’s bed, wrapped warmly in Geth’s arms. Which...was an unprecedented but not unpleasant experience. She buried a yawn in his chest and tried to dredge up memories from last night. She and Geth and Leven had all squeezed together on the terrace bed shortly after sundown. She thought there had been some intention of going to their own rooms eventually, but she and Leven had gotten wrapped up in a long conversation listing all the things they missed about Reality. It didn’t end until Leven fell asleep in her lap and, she supposed, she fell asleep against Geth’s shoulder shortly thereafter.

This morning, however, it was blatantly obvious that Leven was no longer anywhere in the messy pile of limbs that was her and Geth. She rolled over, trying not to wake Geth, and was only half surprised to find Leven sitting on the ground in front of her. He smiled softly and leaned forward to brush her long hair out of her face.

“Good morning,” he said.

Winter closed her eyes and tried to decide if she could fall back asleep. The warmth of Geth’s arm draped over her waist was definitely discouraging her from properly getting up. “Morning,” she mumbled.

“I have a question for you,” Leven said.

She yawned again. “Shoot.”

“Are you in love with Geth?”

That woke her up. Her first instinct was to reply with something snappy and flippant -- _“You’re the omniscient one here, you tell me”_ \-- but she took a moment to feel the weight of Leven’s hand resting lightly on the side of her face and the grounding pressure of Geth’s chest against her back. “Yeah,” she said, then swallowed. “Yeah, I think so.”

Leven sighed. “Good. Me too.”

“Good.”

Winter couldn’t quite suppress a smile as he first pressed a kiss to her forehead, then her lips.

“Wait,” she said, pulling away and propping herself up on her elbow. “Should we tell him?”

Leven laughed. “I have no idea.”

* * *

Winter had never considered herself much of a swimmer. Sure she'd spent her share of afternoons in the Tuttle's small backyard pool, but Janet had never been willing to pay for a trip to the public pool, let alone for proper swim classes. Still, compared to Leven she was practically a fish.

Geth had suggested they spend a day at a nearby lake and Winter had eagerly agreed. Leven had consented with significantly less enthusiasm, and he bluntly refused to spend any time in the water.

“I thought you were over the whole _extreme fear of drowning_ thing,” Winter said. She had waded out until the water was nearly to her knees, wetting the bottom inch of her rolled-up jeans.

“Almost invincible, possibly immortal, technically can't drown,” Leven said, “still kind of terrified of getting in the water.”

“So you're just gonna sit in the sand and watch me and Geth all day?” she teased. “That sounds thrilling.”

“Sounds better than swimming,” he said.

They both paused to look over at Geth, who was standing on the edge of the pier that stretched twenty feet out into the lake. He was stripping down to his boxers.

Leven made a sort of strangled sound in the back of his throat. When Geth dove into the water, Leven asked, “Do you think he's deliberately fucking with us?” His voice was edged with frustration.

“Probably,” Winter said. She quickly wriggled out of her own jeans, balled them up, and threw them back to Leven. He caught them deftly. “I mean, that's what I'm doing.”

“Fucking with me or with him?”

“Who says I can't do both?” she reasoned, then dove forward into the water before he could respond.

The day went quickly. She didn't have the stamina to stay in the water for as long as Geth did nor the skill to swim as quickly as he did, but the cool water and the warm summer sun overhead made her feel refreshed. Leven settled in on the end of the pier and she took several breaks throughout the day to tread water beneath him and splash water on his dangling feet while Geth swam laps between some two points of the lake he seemed to have arbitrarily chosen. Finally, as the afternoon sun had nearly sunk to the tree line, Geth followed her back to the pier. She pulled herself out of the water and sat next to Leven.

“Don't get me wet,” he warned her.

“Don't be such a baby,” she said, leaning over and wringing her hair out over his legs.

He sighed as Geth hoisted himself out of the lake. He settled on Leven's other side, close enough for the water from his leg to soak through Leven's pants from hip to knee.

“Sorry,” Geth offered, raking his wet hair out of his face.

“You're both menaces,” Leven complained, but Winter saw him hook his foot around Geth’s ankle.

* * *

When they returned home that evening, Winter got a fire started before she worried about her hair. Settling in on the floor directly in front of the hearth, she realized that waiting had been a disastrous mistake  -- her hair had managed to get impressively knotted while drying. Twenty minutes after she’d initially sat down with a brush to start the gruesome detangling process, she was still struggling with it. Leven lounged beside her, eyes closed; it was possible he’d fallen asleep during her battle.

“You look like you could use some help with that,” Geth said, leaning in through the window.

“I was thinking I might just leave it,” Winter said, yanking the brush viciously and pulling a knot of her own hair out. “What’s the style like here in Foo? Are giant rat’s nests in?”

“Decidedly not,” Leven said. Awake then. Winter nudged his shoulder with her foot reprovingly.

Geth chuckled. He easily pulled himself into the room, and she offered up the brush as soon as he was near enough to take it. He sat directly behind her, much closer than she had anticipated, one leg folded between them but the other stretched along the outside of her own. “I’m sure you could pull it off.”

She wanted to roll her eyes and call him a flirt, but he reached out and pulled all of her long hair back over her shoulders and a small chill ran down her back, cutting off the words. Geth had gotten dressed again sometime after coming back from the lake, but her hair struggle had distracted her from doing the same. She still wore only her underwear and thin t-shirt; she felt goosebumps rising all along her bare legs. The flames hummed happily.

Winter closed her eyes and let herself take a moment to absorb the warmth of Geth’s hands against her neck as he gathered her hair. “You really have made a mess of this,” he said, slowly pulling the brush through it.  

“I think it made a mess of itself,” she defended.

He didn’t respond and they sat for several minutes in companionable silence. He managed to make quick work of the knots that had vexed her. Soon enough, the brush was running completely smoothly through her hair.

Geth ran his fingers through it to similar effect. “May I braid it?” he asked.

The question caught her by surprise. “You know how to braid?”

“You taught me how,” he said, “your first time in Foo. It’s one of many thing about Reality that I never bothered to learn until I met you.”

Winter pulled her knees up to her chest. “I’ve never had my hair braided before. I mean, not that I can remember, I guess.”

“Another thing you didn’t relearn in Reality?” he asked kindly.

“Janet wasn’t exactly a beautician,” she shrugged.

“I’ll do it for you tonight,” he said, and apparently set to work doing so, “and I can teach you how to do it later, if you’d like.”

Winter wasn’t sure what to say to that, or if it even required an answer, so she didn’t reply. After a moment, however, she said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Leven told me that you and I used to -- that we were dating. Before we went back to Reality.”

His hands slowed in her hair. “That’s not a question,” he said. “But, yes, I suppose he would say that we were.”

“Tell me about it?”

Leven opened his eyes, finally, and sat up facing them. His focus landed on Geth, expression inscrutable. There was a long enough stretch of silence that she thought, perhaps, Geth was declining to answer in the face of Leven’s interest, but eventually he said, hesitantly, “Lithen...don’t really date. At least, not the way you’re thinking of. Not the way nits do.”

“How do nits date?” she asked.

“Proactively,” he said, finishing the braid and deftly securing the ends. “You make all sorts of plans and promises and commitments to each other, as though you could ever know how fate is going to treat your relationship. Lithen are much more….fluid in our connections. It’s our nature to enjoy the time we have with the people we like while fate allows us to remain together, but not to put undue effort into prolonging relationships that fate has separated.”

Winter turned around to face him, and found herself surprised anew at his proximity. “Is that why you were so calm about Phoebe leaving?” she asked, voice quiet. The subject seemed too delicate to broach at regular volume. Even the fire was humming more softly.

Geth didn’t hesitate to meet her gaze. “If it is fate for Phoebe and I to meet again, it will happen. There’s little point in lingering over what has ended.”

“That’s what happened between us, then? We were just...separated by fate?”

Geth made a quiet sound that might have been a laugh. “That’s one way of putting it.”

His hand was resting lightly on her bare knee, fingers tracing small circles beneath her scar.

“What’s another way?” she asked.

“You left,” he said simply.

“I broke up with you?” The idea sounded ludicrous to Winter, but she couldn’t deny the sense of relief she felt at the idea that Geth, at least, hadn’t had any objections to their relationship.

“Not explicitly, but your decision to return to Reality to guide Leven to Foo didn’t exactly prolong our romance,” he said. His gaze flicked to Leven briefly. “Although, of course, I did become a seed, so perhaps it is more apt to simply say that fate had separate plans for us at the time.”

Winter took Geth’s hand in her own, and leaned forward slightly. The air between them felt heavy and charged, and she wondered, wildly, if that was just something that the air in Foo did sometimes. “Fate brought us back together,” she said.

There was a brightness in his eyes when he replied. “So it did.”

She reached up and ghosted her thumb along Geth’s cheek, then slid her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck. He pressed his forehead against hers and closed his eyes.

“Can I kiss you?” she asked, voice barely a whisper.

Without replying, Geth tilted his head and pressed his lips to hers. He tasted like the lake water, the salt of it still clinging to his skin. She licked it off of his lips, out of his mouth, and pressed forward eagerly for more. Geth leaned back, resting his weight on one hand and sliding the other up from her knee to curl around her hip tightly.She chased after him, climbing into his lap, bracing her knees on either side of his hips and wrapping both of her arms around his neck to try and pull him even closer. 

It wasn’t until she felt Leven’s hand on her back that she finally pulled away. Geth looked somewhat dazed, his lips parted and his hair tousled. There were only a few seconds for Winter to register all of this before Leven leaned forward and kissed Geth. Geth seemed surprised, but responded in kind with no hesitation.

Leven’s hand dropped down to the small of Winter’s back, rucking up her shirt until his fingers met her bare skin. She turned her attention to sliding a line of open-mouthed kisses up Geth’s neck. When she sucked his earlobe into her mouth and worried at it with her teeth, he let out a choked-off moan against Leven’s mouth.

Winter couldn’t hold back a grin.

It was going to be fun to take him apart.

* * *

When Winter woke up the next morning, Leven was teaching Geth how to thumb wrestle. They sat on the bed beside her, facing each other and both hunched over their clasped hands. Geth had a look of utter concentration on his face as Leven counted out the rhyme to begin the match. She looked at the furrow between his eyebrows and thought that she wanted to kiss him until he smiled.

Leven’s gaze flicked to her for a short moment, and the corner of his mouth twitched upward. Seemingly without effort, he pinned Geth’s thumb down and then surged forward and kissed him. Geth responded eagerly, concentration gone in an instant.

When Leven pulled back, he was smirking. “I win,” he said.

Winter hit him in the shoulder with a pillow at same time Geth lunged, pressing Leven flat against the bed and straddling his chest. Leven raised his arms in front of his face loosely, as if guarding himself. “Ah, I give up!” he shrieked. “Don’t gang up on me. That’s not fair.”

Geth poked him in the ribs. “What do you call what you just did?”

“Okay, technically it was cheating, but Winter was the one who suggested it.”

She squawked in outrage. “I did not.”

“You didn’t _say_ anything,” Leven admitted, “but you thought about it really loudly.”

Winter rolled her eyes and looked up at Geth. “I’m really excited to have at least one boyfriend who isn’t a creepy psychic,” she said. To her surprise, he frowned slightly.

“I thought we talked about this last night,” he said delicately, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Lithen don’t really date, so I’m not exactly…”

He trailed off as Leven started laughing. “Of course you’re our boyfriend,” he said at the same time Winter said, incredulously, “Did I actually let you get away with that last time?”

“Get away with what?” Geth asked hesitantly.

“With being ridiculous. I thought you were supposed to be the mature one here.”

“You’ve never really dated anyone before,” Leven said, stretching himself out languidly in that way that always made Winter’s heart beat a little faster, “because you’ve never loved anyone as much as you love us.”

Geth's expression softened. He leaned over, curled his fingers around Leven's wrists where his arms were were stretched towards the headboard, and pressed a long, slow kiss to his mouth.

“See what I mean about Lev being creepy psychic?” Winter said when they pulled apart.

Geth chuckled softly. “I do,” he said, and pulled her into an equally searing kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song by Cobra Starship


End file.
